To run an efficient and high-performing IT environment, you need to explore your server inventory regularly to find opportunities for consolidation. The goal is to cut capital and operational expenses while providing adequate resources to support your business growth. Because they lack reliable data, IT leaders often have to make critical judgments about server investments based on assumptions and gut feelings. Sadly, such decision-making in the dark can lead to either excess server capacity or systems that slow down or go down.

By utilizing a comprehensive infrastructure performance monitoring solution, Galileo Performance Explorer, to survey your IT environment around the clock, you will gain critical performance insights within minutes, so you can make informed decisions about your requirements for servers.

Galileo takes the mystery out of server consolidation. You don’t have to be an expert. Simply use this straightforward methodology to uncover the answers you need for a successful server consolidation:

1. Monitor Your IT Environment

Before your server consolidation analysis, monitor your infrastructure with Galileo 24/7/365 for a timeframe that includes the period when demands on your servers are greatest.

2. Virtually Group the Servers for Analysis

Galileo’s Tag Manager enables you to tag and group servers virtually so you can analyze them as an entity.

3. Define a Timeframe

Delineate your timeframe. To do so, consider your business cycles. For instance, an online retailer with a peak season around the holidays needs to include late November and December in their analysis. If it’s missing from charts and trend lines, they run the risk of underestimating their needs.

4. Create a Baseline

Now you have the required historical data to create a profile for your server metrics and your current performance requirements — CPU and memory usage, network and adapter performance, and disk space. You may discover some servers are practically asleep while others are near the breaking point.

5. Forecast Workload Growth

Galileo’s trending feature, can help you understand trends and use them to forecast growth. It’s important to recognize that there may not be a one-to-one relationship between your server needs and either sales or employee growth. To project future server needs, you need to understand what drives growth. You can determine this, for example, by looking at the historical data trends and correlating that data with server utilization.

6. Play “What If?” Games

Once you have an idea where the trends will take your organization, you can play “What if?” games with your virtual group of servers in Galileo. Try out some scenarios and see how many servers you will need to accommodate anticipated growth.

7. Create Your Server Consolidation Plan

Based on this process that’s solidly grounded in the facts, create a server consolidation plan that optimizes your investments. By doing so, you’ll minimize the initial capital expenses for new servers. Plus, you’ll reduce operational costs for maintenance, space, energy, and salaries and benefits for system administrators.